Point Breeze, Philadelphia

Point Breeze is a multicultural neighborhood in South Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1816, Napoleon Bonaparte's brother Joseph Bonaparte purchased the property after emigrating to the United States from France. It was not integrated into the rectangular grid system until at least 1843, and its earliest inhabitants were Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants who arrived in the 1890s; African-Americans arrived in the neighborhood during the Great Migration of the 1930s. During the 1960s, Point Breeze was safe, clean, integrated, and self-sufficient, but racial tensions and the fear of race riots caused white flight during the 1970s and a demographic shift. The heroin epidemic of the 1970s and the crack epidemic of the 1990s brought high crime rates to Point Breeze, and it lost 10% of its population between 1990 and 2000 alone. During the 1990s and 2000s, Vietnamese immigrants began to arrive in Point Breeze, making up 12% of the population by 2004. During the later 2000s and 2010s, Point Breeze underwent gentrification, lowering the crime rate.